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NATO Sees Flaws in Air Campaign Against Qaddafi

WASHINGTON — Despite widespread praise in Western capitals for NATO’s leadership of the air campaign in Libya, a confidential NATO assessment paints a sobering portrait of the alliance’s ability to carry out such campaigns without significant support from the United States.

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

The findings undercut the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s effectiveness, the report said.

Mounting an operation in Syria would pose a bigger challenge than the seven-month campaign that drove Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya from power, American officials said. Syria has a more capable military as well as a formidable array of sophisticated Russian-made air defenses that Pentagon officials say would take weeks of airstrikes to destroy.

“If anything were to be envisaged over Syria, even in purely hypothetical terms, it would also rely heavily on U.S. capabilities,” said one senior European diplomat who reviewed the 37-page NATO report, which was completed in late February.

The report, whose findings and recommendations are expected to be endorsed by NATO ministers at a meeting in Brussels this week, is consistent with preliminary assessments that European and Canadian planes carried out the bulk of the combat flights to protect Libyan civilians, while the United States provided military support that was essential in accomplishing the mission.

But the report and more than 300 pages of supporting documents, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer telling new details about shortcomings in planning, staffing and conducting the combat mission, as well as how commanders improvised to adjust.

The report also spotlights an important issue for the alliance that dates to the Balkan wars of the 1990s: that the United States has emerged “by default” as the NATO specialist in providing precision-guided munitions — which made up virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles dropped or fired on Libya — and a vast majority of specialized aircraft that conduct aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, or I.S.R. in military parlance.

“NATO remains overly reliant on a single ally to provide I.S.R. collection capabilities that are essential to the commander,” the report said.

In this criticism, however, several American and other allied officials said they saw a silver lining. The NATO report played a significant role in helping the alliance agree in February to acquire its own dedicated air-to-ground surveillance system to track and target hostile ground forces, the officials said.

The assessment also helped spur a French-led initiative backed by the Obama administration to establish a hub for allied surveillance aircraft, including Predator and Global Hawk drones, at an Italian air base in Sicily. This concept is modeled after a similar approach NATO has developed in Afghanistan, and it is expected to be approved by allied leaders at a NATO summit meeting in Chicago next month.

In addition, European defense ministers agreed last month on an ambitious proposal to expand the allies’ aerial refueling fleet, another American-backed measure that NATO officials will highlight in Chicago.

Photo

An Italian Harrier warplane refuels from a British VC-10 tanker aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea off Libya on July 10, 2011.Credit
David Brunnstrom/Reuters

“NATO always draws the lessons from its operations, and we’re already doing that with Libya,” Adm. James G. Stavridis, an American officer who is the alliance’s senior military commander, said in an e-mail statement.

Most of the recommendations, particularly those that involve buying expensive aircraft and technical equipment, could take years to put in place.

And those solutions will not address the immediate concerns raised by advocates of using allied air power to stop the slaughter of civilians in Syria.

Two of those advocates, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, toured a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey before a fragile, United Nations-brokered cease-fire took hold last week. They once again called on the international community to arm the Syrian rebels and to intervene militarily to create and protect havens for Syrian civilians and rebels receiving training.

“Airstrikes would help to establish and defend safe havens in Syria, especially in the north, in which opposition forces can organize and plan their political and military activities against Assad,” Mr. McCain said last month at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

President Obama has requested that the Pentagon begin preparing preliminary military options in Syria — a routine step for military contingency planning during crises overseas — but the administration still believes that using diplomatic and economic pressure is the best way to stop the violent repression by the Syrian government.

Information about targets in Libya was drawn largely from the databases of individual nations, and much of this could not be shared rapidly among NATO members and partners because of “classification or procedural reasons,” the report found.

“Nations did not effectively and efficiently share national intelligence and targeting information among allies and with partners,” the report said. “The inability to share information presented a major hindrance to nations deciding if a target could be engaged” based on information from another country.

The NATO command in Italy suffered from serious shortages of political and legal advisers, intelligence analysts, logistics planners, linguists, and specialists in selecting targets, called targeteers. “Many targeteers had not been adequately trained on deliberate, dynamic or time-sensitive targeting,” the report said, adding that many specialists were assigned to the command for only a few weeks.

The report was silent on the controversies that have followed the campaign. These included questions surrounding at least scores of civilian deaths caused by NATO action, which have been documented by independent researchers and the United Nations alike, and accusations by survivors and human rights organizations that alliance naval vessels did not assist boats in distress carrying migrants who later perished at sea.

Fred Abrahams, a special adviser for Human Rights Watch, said the report was consistent with the alliance’s refusal to acknowledge clear mistakes, and revealed a “willful decision not to look at civilian casualties.”

“It’s not lessons learned, it’s lessons lost,” he said by telephone from New York. “There is no reason whatsoever, in an otherwise effective campaign, not to look back and explore the areas where things went wrong.”

The report also passed over a number of tactical details without examining the rationale for them or their potential risks and consequences. It noted, for example, that the alliance itself did not have what it called “boots on ground” but did not disclose that forward air control teams — troops on the ground to help guide planes to intended targets — were used later in the conflict by member nations, or that the anti-Qaddafi forces were providing targeting recommendations to NATO via informal means, sometimes even by way of Twitter or e-mail.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: NATO Finds Crucial Flaws In Libya Action. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe